Annie and I sit next to each other – she with her bucket between her legs, I with my head in my lap.

Tooth gives us both the once over.

“Do you two really think the rest of the world should be more like you?” he says.

“Why not?” Annie says.

“So you’re the standard to which all others should aspire,” Tooth says, gesturing toward the bucket as if to reiterate the Really?

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say.

“But you’d go part of the way,” Tooth says.

I shrug.

Tooth thinks a bit.

“Ok,” he says with hand clap. “Let’s try an exercise.”

“Exercise?” Bandana says. “Been reading those psych books again?”

Tooth ignores the comment. “We’re going to have a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament,” he announces.

Just like a Laker fan. Brings paper to a shark knife fight.

Some groan. Others look excited.

Patch scoffs. “That’s a game of luck,” he says. “There’s no skill involved.”

“Precisely,” Tooth says. “The winner will be determined entirely by chance. We need to learn to accept that winning and losing is often beyond our control.”

“I already know that,” I say.

“But you don’t handle it well,” Tooth says.

“So you want me to feel good about being a loser?” I say.

“Listen to how you phrased that – being a loser,” Tooth says. “I want you to accept losing, not being a loser. Winning and losing does not define you. You need to stop treating it like it does.” Tooth stands. “Alright, let’s begin.”

He pairs us into twos and reminds us of the rules – rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.

“Each round will be a best of 7 series,” Tooth says, with a wink to me. Amusing.

For starters, Annie and I face off.

“You ready to rock?” I say to her.

Squinting with concentration, she puts down her bucket and nods.

Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

Now you might think I would go paper, given that Are you ready to rock? sounds like an attempt to put rock into her head.

But no.

Women have an inherent disrespect and distrust of men. Realizing I’m trying to make her think rock, Annie would expect me to go paper. To defend against this, she would go scissors.

Which she does. I go rock.

Rock breaks scissors. I’m up 1-0.

“Don’t rock the boat now,” I say.

Again with the rock. Will I go rock again? She either thinks I will, or thinks I’m expecting her to do so, which means I’m going rock or paper. In this case, her safest move is paper, giving her to the best odds to win or tie.

So of course, I go scissors. 2-0.

“This is strange,” I say. “On paper, you should be better than me at this.”Now I’ve got her on the run. She hopes I’ll go paper, so she goes scissors.

I go rock instead.

3-0.

I finish her off in 5.

The next round is Patch. You wouldn’t think a person playing Rock, Paper, Scissors would have a tell, but Patch does. His middle finger twitches before rock, he makes a tight fist before paper, and he opens his hand like paper before scissors. I polish him off in 6.

Finally, it’s me and tooth. Standing, he and I face each other while the rest of the group circles us like it’s Fight Club or something.

The first rule of Rock, Paper, Scissors is: you do not talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors. The second rule of Rock, Paper, Scissors is: you DO NOT talk about Rock, Paper, Scissors.

I’ve never looked at Tooth quite this close before. His wisp of a beard looks like something only a 12-year-old would be proud of.

“You and me in the Finals,” he says, grinning.

As I’m staring at Tooth, trying to concentrate, I get dizzy. Something unpleasant is about to happen. I can almost feel the neurotransmitters in my brain firing in preposterous directions…

…Patch taking in the whole scene with an ecstatic, childlike smile on his face, screaming “THIS IS AWESOME!”…

Paul Pierce. The Truth. You can’t handle the Truth.

“So are we gonna play, or what?” The voice is dark and sinister.

It’s him.

The acrobats morph into Laker cheerleaders. The bear grows into Kobe Bryant. The Cub Scouts turn into…well, larger Cub Scouts, but now their uniforms have a yellow and purple theme.

“What are we waiting for?” he says.

I’m too afraid to reply. Maybe I’m waiting for him to pull out an axe and say Heeeeeere’s Johnny! or something.

That’s right. Him – the most sinister, powerful, profoundly in-your-face Laker fan in the history of Earth – Jack Nicholson.

“What are we waiting for?” he says in that distinctive baritone.

My perception of him spins as if he’s staring at me from inside a front loading dryer, and when he steadies, he’s become the cartoonish Joker character he played in that 1989 Michael Keaton Batman movie.

I have thouroughly enjoyed this series so far and after reading this chapter I couldn't be a silent enjoyer anymore. This chapter was pure brilliance and the mental image of someone blacked out on the floor from the best game of rock, paper, scissors ever that you had painted for me was ingenious and very well written.

Sometimes when I have writer's block, I go for a run. The criteria for a worthy development is that the idea must make me laugh out loud while jogging. The Nicholson-conversation-slash-rock-paper-scissors-black-out had me thoroughtly impressed with my own idiocy.

And then when I came across a previously unknown (to me) item about the moon over Boston in 84, it was the cherry on top...

Lordhenry - game 7 will pass with little fanfare, but it's after-effects will linger...

And I couldn't disagree more about Ledger's Joker. Bawful and I both scoffed at the idea of him playing the Joker when we first heard about it, and then both were in awe of his work when we finally saw it. His passing added some gravitas to the movie, but his portrayal was so affecting as to linger across the entire movie, much like Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins had only 26 minutes of screen time, but you could feel his eerie presence in every frame...I liken Ledger's performance to Hopkins' in that regard.

Yet, I pay due homage to Nicholson's Joker by seeing to it that Doug doesn't get the best of Jack, and in the end puts Doug in his place.

I thought The Dark Knight was a mediocre movie, with a superlative performance by Ledger. {Strangely enough, I put Dark Knight and Knight's Tale at about the same level wrt quality. BTW, Ledger was surprisingly good in Knight's Tale, which was otherwise not so hot. He makes an otherwise crap movie tolerable.}

A lot of people get pissed off at me when I say this about Dark Knight. But beside Ledger, what does Knight really have to offer? A really choppy script, insufficient character motivations, solid but uninspired acting aside from Ledger, and way too much reliance of CGI and action instead of real plot and dialog (reminds me of Catwoman in that regard). Oh, and I have yet to see Bale act better than Tom Cruise. I see them as very similar in terms of skill, except that Bale does the dark and brooding thing while Cruise does the electric smile. Both are very limited. Please, clench your jaws for me again, gentlemen. Ho hum.

Keaton, on the other hand, was a good Batman. Odd. Enigmatic. A little quirky and maybe a little disquieting. Isn't that what batman is supposed to be?

Worm - Since I'm deep in bromance with you, I will not let your thoughts about Dark Knight get to me...however...

If I go by pure rewatchability, I always find myself skipping directly to Ledger's appearances in the film, because they are hypnotically great, much like I would transfix on Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs.

Yes, if you removed Ledger from Dark Knight, the movie would be ho hum...but that's a little like "If the Bulls didn't have Jordan, what would they be?"...The fact is, he was in it, and it elevated the movie tremendously.

Agree with your point about Keaton, and I think Bale's performance is pretty universally considered over the top. For a while I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, as in "well, Bruce Wayne would have to alter his voice so people wouldn't know he was Batman"...but it didn't work...not sure if that was directing, but regarding Bale in general - he's great in American Psycho, 3:10 to Yuma, and I would recommend getting "The Machinist" if you think he can't act in ways beyond the standard abilities of others. Trust me on that one.

Gotta agree with Worm. My friends constantly get irritated with me when I say that I prefer Batman Begins to The Dark Knight. I don't think the Dark Knight was bad, but it tried to hard to be "dark" and "gritty," which is a trend I'm getting a bit tired of. Ledger was awesome, no argument there, however.